Slides

Transcript

Chas Ballew: Okay, let’s get started. Thank you everybody for joining. This is the … Oh boy, can I go backwards? This is the April 2017 Aptible Update Webinar. This is part our quarterly webinar series. We’re giving one of these every quarter, in order to give everybody updates and insight into what we’ve been working on over the last quarter. The agenda for today will be like most of these. [00:00:30] First our enclave team lead Thomas Orozco will go through the enclave features and updates that we’ve shipped over the last quarter since January. Then Skylar Anderson our grid iron lead will cover grid iron updates and availability for that. Then we’ll have time for open questions at the end.

As we go along, if you have questions that come up, go ahead and use the Q&A feature in zoom here, to just put those [00:01:00] in. Then Frank Macreery our CTO will moderate and make sure that all of those get answered. We’re going to be recording this as we go. Afterwards we’ll post the recording and a transcript and a link to register for the July update webinar on our blog, or on our resources page rather. So, aptible.com/resources. We’ll also tweet a link out to that. With that, [00:01:30] I’m going to turn it over to Thomas, thank you.

Thomas Orozco: Thanks, Chas. We’re going to start with what’s new on Enclave. Before we start, I just want to take a few minutes and bring up one thing, which is that we’re really looking for feedback [00:01:48] we’ve got in the Enclave parts. We’re planning to schedule [00:01:52] interviews with some customers to discuss essentially how they view the Enclave, and how we can make that part better [00:02:00] for you.

If you’re interested, feel free to send direct message on this where we know that Frank that’s something wrong, we need to be working on it at least. If you’d like to participate, it’s a good occasion for you to share feedback about what you like about the product, what you’d like to see changed, what improvements you can think of. We’d be really happy to listen to what you have to say there. So, if you’re interested, just message Frank and he’ll sort you out.

With that, let’s start with the changes we’ve made this quarter to this product. [00:02:30] Our vision, which we talked about this in the last webinar, it’s really unchanged. We want Enclave to really be the best place for you to ship regulated and sensitive projects. This quarter the sphere where we invested were security and compliance, database self-service, and finally some miscellaneous usability improvements.

I’ll be talking through each of those in order. Security and compliance is the big item this quarter. Database self-service [00:03:00] will be the second one, so we’ll spend most of our time on those two.

To start, let’s talk about security and compliance. There’s 3 major actions where we are working right now in that direction. First, we are making it easier for you to deploy and secure your apps on Aptible. Second, we’re helping you meet your compliance goals, we’re making that more easy. And finally, we’ve worked towards improving the security of Enclave itself [00:03:30] as a part of it.

Once, again we’ll go with each of these in order. Let’s go in priory and talk about app security. Three main features ship here, the first one is IP filtering. This is essentially firewalls for your app endpoints. The next one is manage is support for internal endpoints. This one is a bit more specific, but for those that are using internal endpoints, it’ll probably be a welcome change. And finally, we’re introducing a private beta of our docker [00:04:00] image security scanning.

Let’s talk about IP filtering first. As I mentioned, the IP filtering is about you letting you firewall your app endpoints. Essentially using this feature, what you can do is think about your endpoints and restrict traffic to a set of allowed sources. So if you have a handful of sources you want to allow, maybe offers, maybe a specific customer, you can use this.

Typical use cases for it will really include things like internal app, [00:04:30] maybe you’re running Kibana, you have an admin dashboard, these are each cases for it. Maybe you have have private API that high volume customer has access to maybe in a hospital, maybe a partner, integration partner. That’s a use case where you can expose an API and restrict it to their IPs. Finally, a more commonplace, more broadly applicable is you have a prerelease app and you don’t want anyone else to see it, but you would like some partner or customer and [00:05:00] you can use IP filtering for that.

To set it up is really easy. That’s really the goal for IP filtering, is to be an easy to set up firewall. To us it all you have to do is go into dashboard, find the endpoint you want, and provide us with the IP address that you want to whitelist. This can be IP addresses, it can be entire CIDRs if you like. So this gives you flexibility in terms of what you want to whitelist. And you can provide a list of up to 50 IP per endpoints, [00:05:30] essentially more, you can always add additional endpoints. This will help you, again make is easier to firewall in app and restrict it to those [00:05:39]. That’s IP filtering.

Another feature, actually goes in a similar direction, is managed HTTPS for internal endpoints. Let’s write this down a little bit. There’s two phases really, here. First one is internal endpoint and then there’s managed HTTPS. [00:06:00] For internal endpoints, let’s talk about this for a second. Eventually they are a tool that let’s you isolate your apps. When you have an app that should only be accessed from within your Aptible PC.

Typically these cases for this would include you have a set of microservices and you have a proxy in front of them, these microservices. It doesn’t make sense to them to be accessible outside your VPC. In this case you can just set them up and [00:06:30] ensure that they’re only accessible within your VPC. Other cases would be you have an internal app, or dashboard if you have a VPN connection tying your Aptible PC to your office, then you can just use internal endpoints to these and they’ll only be accessible to customers within your VPC or within your VPN connection.

Internal endpoints, you can view them as slightly more [00:06:56] IP filtering. They have more limitations, but they are essentially, you [00:07:00] say you like everything that’s outside my VPC shouldn’t talk to this app, everything that’s inside should be allowed to talk to it. That’s internal endpoints.

Managed HTTPS is a separate feature which we introduced six months ago, which makes it easier for you to create endpoints on Aptible. That’s obviously designed there. The way managed HTTPS works is it will provision SSL and TLS certificates for you. So you don’t have to do any work to do that. We take care of it. All you need really, is to bring [00:07:30] your own domain name.

[00:07:31] potentially each case for this, as you can imagine if you have a microservices architecture as I mentioned, that you may want to use managed HTTPS to secure each of these microservices. Likewise you may want to use Kibana, you can add kibana.com or something that you can access via your VPN under whose name that makes sense. Obviously the use case of managed HTTPS in Let’s Encrypt. But [00:08:00] there is internal endpoints, but as you will see soon there a little hurdle that we had to sort for you. Which lies in how manage HTTPS itself works.

To get manage HTTPS to work, what we do is we integrate with Let’s Encrypt. The process essentially is we verify a domain with them and then we can get a certificate from Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt gives us various ways to verify a domain, there are three of them.

The first one is HTTP. [00:08:30] They make a request to endpoints on Aptible. The next one is DNS. They look at a DNS record that we must have set to a specific value. And the last one is TLS-SNI, when they connect them we have to serve them with particular certificates.

The problem with this is that originally we supported HTTP verification, which is very convenient, very easy to set up. But has one major downside which is that obviously it [00:09:00] can’t work with internal endpoints. The entire purpose of internal endpoints is to block external traffic and the traffic of Let’s Encrypt therefore becomes blocked. So it wasn’t supported, originally managed HTTPS did support internal endpoints.

That’s why we’re happy to announce now, that this now actually works. We now support DNS verification on top of HTTP, so you can use either of these. And it does mean that you can now use managed HTTPS with internal endpoints using DNS verification. Hopefully this should make [00:09:30] your life easier, it should reside on internal endpoints again for microservices for internal dashboards. You’ll be able to set up that using managed HTTPS rather than have to provision your old certificates.

I’ve talked about these two features, so I have on the one hand IP filtering, on the other one internal endpoints. As you can see there’s obviously some overlap between them. I’ve talked about IP filtering as being an easy [00:09:58] to set up. On the other [00:10:00] hand we have internal endpoints which have stronger isolation. I’ll just take one minute to recap the comparison and help you if you have any questions on which one to pick.

IP filtering is one set of IPs you want to whitelist. This is typically really convenient if you have a private integration partner, a customer that you need to expose to when they give you the IP they’ll use to connect. It’s very convenient, [00:10:30] you can just use IP filtering for this.

If on the other side you have all your apps that need to talk to internal microservice, then you’ll probably want to use an internal endpoint instead so that all clients within your VPC will be able to access.

Essentially what it comes down to, if it’s for internal endpoints usually you won’t have a choice, you’ll typically want to use IP filtering. If it’s for internal traffic, you’ll typically want to pick internal endpoints instead as they will be much easier to maintain. You won’t have to maintain IP whitelist and so on.

The one [00:11:00] area where both solutions could work is for internal tools. Something like again, Kibana or and admin dashboard. For this it will really depend on how you are accessing those. If you have a VPN into your Aptible VPC, then we recommend using internal endpoints. If you don’t, then you’ll typically want to use IP filtering to load that down a little bit.

To continue on that [00:11:30] note of helping you secure your apps, we have docker image scanning. It looks like we had a question on internal endpoints. We’ll take those now, if there are a few questions about internal endpoints we can probably hit them now.

Frank Macreery: Yeah, sure. The first is, does IP filtering support IPv6 IPs?

Thomas Orozco: No. Endpoint in general in Aptible currently only support IPv4 traffic. Likewise, IP filtering only let’s you [00:12:00] restrict traffic on IPv4.

Frank Macreery: Okay, great. Another question, Pete asked. When using IP filtering with external endpoints, are the clients in the VPC automatically allowed access? Or is it necessary to also add the IP of the local VPC?

Thomas Orozco: That’s a good question, so they will not be able to access. You will have to allow these, if you [00:12:30] want these guys to have access you will need to white list them separately. Which in this case will typically require whitelisting your own Aptible VPC with the endpoint because the traffic will probably move outside through your endpoints. Which is probably something we could add some documentation on. I’ll look in on to do that. The answer is, no. Nothing is automatically whitelisted, by default nothing is whitelisted. You’ll have to add these IPs individually, or of course use an internal endpoint.

Frank Macreery: [00:13:00] Great. The last question on this topic is, how many IP filtering rules, or how many CIDRs are permitted per endpoint? Is there a limit? Is there a recommended best practices of [crosstalk 00:13:17] allow a lot of IPs?

Thomas Orozco: Oh yeah. I probably went a little fast I think I mentioned that, but it probably went a little quick. I’m sorry. Yes, there is a limit. It’s 15 IPs or CIDRs per endpoints. If you need more than that, typically [00:13:30] you’ll want to add additional endpoints or merge these into bigger CIDRs. It really depends on what you can do. If there’s a bigger CIDR you can use, then by all means do that. If not, then you need to whitelist 20 individual CIDRs, 20 individual IPs. Then you can add additional endpoints and each of these can have their own rules.

Frank Macreery: Awesome, thanks Thomas.

Thomas Orozco: All right. Back to the presentation. We have docker image security [00:14:00] scanning. Which as I mentioned right now is private beta. This new feature is actually an integration of Aptible with a third party that’s called Appcanary. What it’s going to help you scan your docker images and ensure that they are, that essentially you’ll have any vulnerable packages in them, [00:14:21] at least notify you about these. It’s typically something you can use to read compliance requirements of security scanning.

The way it works is, [00:14:30] you just sign up with Appcanary and you give us your API key, any apps you like to monitor, then whatever you deploy on Aptible, we’ll grab the list of packages in your image and send that list off to Appcanary. If any of these packages are vulnerable, or if any vulnerabilities come up in the future, they will immediately notify you and let you know about that, so that you can [00:14:53] these packages.

This is for system packages, so it’s not going to be scanning your actual [00:15:00] authentication code, but for any system packages you have in your image, which are typically … Often you’ll have a lot of these but you don’t necessarily know which ones they are, or maybe they came from the base image, you didn’t install them yourself. It’s typically very convenient to make sure that you keep an eye on those packages, even if they’re not very visible from your perspective.

These packages, we’ll support scanning them via Appcanary for any image that based on Ubuntu, Debian, [00:15:30] or CentOS. As I mentioned earlier, this is in private beta. If you’d like to have access, you can either contact support or if you’re watching this slide, you can of course, once again talk to Frank and that’s something we can help set up.

As I mentioned it’s in private beta, so right now the integration has to go through support. Eventually we’d like to expose this directly to dashboards. How exactly this pans out will depend on the feedback we get and how useful this turns out to be.

[00:16:00] That’s it for the security changes we have brought to the platform and your apps. Next, let’s talk about compliance, changes we introduced here.

The first one is ALB endpoints, which now let you customize your HTTPS protocol list. The next one is databases that now support AES-256 encryption by default.

For ALB endpoints, essentially by default the ALB endpoints will allow traffic [00:16:30] over all versions of TLS, so TLS1.0, 1.1 and 1.2. These protocols are all secure, there’s no vulnerability that’s inside with them, it’s secure to use them. But it is pretty common for your auditors to restrict you to a subset of these. In fact it’s pretty common for them to restrict you to TLS1.1 or greater.

For example, there’s a requirement in [00:16:53] PCI DSS, that’s also now a part of this guidance. The reason for that is that there’s a number of [00:17:00] interpretations of TLS1.0 that are vulnerable to issues similar to POODLE, which [00:17:06]. So in these cases it makes sense for your auditor to say, I don’t know if your implementation is correct or not, but what I do know is that disabling TLS1.0 altogether makes that OK. The easier option for them is to require you to support TLS1.1 or greater, which is now what we let you do on Aptible, again, so that you can easily … if you need to check that box, it becomes trivial for you to do so.

[00:17:30] The way this works, it’s actually something that used to work on EL endpoints, which we flagged as something that would be coming to ALB endpoints, it has now come. It’s just this one variable that’s called SSL protocols override, that you can set. As soon as you set that variable to the list of protocols you would like to allow, then all other protocols will be excluded.

For example, as you can see this shell section that I have in these slides, if using TLS1.0 it works by default. But as soon as you set the firewall, [00:18:00] then using TLS1.0 fails and you’ll have to use TLS1.1 or greater to connect.

That’s going to make it easier for you if you have to compliance requirements, which in our experience is becoming increasingly common, you’ll be able to meet it by just setting this one variable.

Another requirement that comes up pretty often is about disk encryption. We’ve seen that an increasing amount of times, which is why we made that change. Originally Aptible was using AES-192 for our [00:18:30] encryption, and again there was a security concern with it, but it’s becoming industry standard to use AES-256 instead. So we’ve made that change and now anytime you provision a database on Aptible it will be using AES-256 for encryption.

Once again, I do need to mention here is that if you have a database that was provisioned before Aptible, before we introduced that change, it will still be using AES-192. Fundamentally we can’t just re-encrypt all your data. Behind the scenes, [00:19:00] that could cause downtime, which is probably not what you want. For these cases you’ll have to dump the data and restore it somewhere else, which is typically something want to join [00:19:11] with though.

It does mean that you’ll have some databases that will be using different encryption algorithms. In this case you can find out if you’re unsure, it’s going to be in your dashboard. You can find out which one they’re using. It’s just going to be the dashboard, under the database, the disk encryption title [00:19:30] will tell you exactly what’s being used.

All right. And to wrap up that section on security, let’s talk about the security of the Enclave platform itself. There’s two things we shipped this quarter to help in that direction, there’s U2F authentication and then there’s a set of internal architectural changes we performed so that we can increase security of the platform itself.

U2F authentication, [00:20:00] let’s talk about what U2F is in the first place. Essentially using this dongle you can see in the background of the slide. You can now use these security keys as a second factor while authentication to Aptible. Right now, you may be using 2FA, and when you log in you get prompted for those six characters from your phone. You can use a security key like this one.

The main benefits, well, there’s two main benefits. The first one is that this [00:20:30] is more convenient. You don’t have to copy six, potentially make a typo. Instead, you’ll be able to just touch that key and that will work, and now you’re in. But more importantly, these keys will protect you against phishing. If you have a security key, then whenever you login to Aptible the security key will send the origin you’re currently looking at. So what site you’re looking at, it will send that to Aptible and then our authentication API can double check that you are not currently being phished. [00:21:00] If you are, it will decline authenticating you, to ensure that whoever is trying to phish you doesn’t actually get your credentials.

Originally we introduced this to secure our own team. We felt it was important to ensure the Aptible team had more security because of course we have access to accounts, and so on. So it made sense for us to make [00:21:30] that change. We decided to also make that available to everyone else so you can use that yourself whenever you want to authenticate other than 2FA.

To set this up, all you have to do is get a security key in the first place. The Aptible team is using the keys, but you can choose something else. As long as it complies to the [00:21:54] of U2F, which is an open standard. as it conforms to that standard you’ll be able to use it. But otherwise you can just [00:22:00] … As soon as you have that key you’ll be able to use it with Aptible.

You’ll need browser that supports it. Right now that does mean you’ll have to use Chrome, which is the only one that supports it. That being said, other browsers including Firefox plan to do that. Finally you can set that up via the Aptible dashboard. It’s a really simple process. All you need to do is plug the key in and just touch it and it will handshake with the Aptible authentication API to set you up.

[00:22:30] Right. Frank?

Frank Macreery: We’ve got a few questions. Before we do that, just one quick comment. I know that at the beginning we asked customers to feel free to DM me if they wanted to set up an Enclave review with the Aptible engineers. It looks like you can’t actually DM me, but feel free to send a [00:23:00] chat message to all panelists if you want to do this privately in a way that we know who you are, but it doesn’t get broadcast to everybody as a Q&A. So, feel free to just send a chat message to all panelists and it’ll just go to Chas, Thomas, Skylar and I.

Anyway, moving on, we’ve got a few questions here.

A couple folks asked about where they can get the physical U2F FIDO keys. You mentioned that any physical U2F FIDO key is [00:23:30] compatible. I’ll drop a link to one example on Amazon.com to those folks who ask that so that they can follow that. But Thomas, did you have thing else to follow up there?

Thomas Orozco: Yes. You can essential use, as Frank mentioned, any key that conforms to the FIDO U2F specification. The ones we have and we’ve tested are UB keys, so the one in the screen shot which also looks like what I’m showing right now. It looks like [00:24:00] this. UB keys will be supported in Aptible, we have also tested keys from HyperFIDO which do also work. We haven’t tested other brands, so we can’t recommend them, obviously. In my personal experience the UB keys do work a little better. I’ve had a handful of issues with other keys, but for the most part providers that are compliant, I guess really if you are procuring any device you may need to use [00:24:30] it.

Frank Macreery: Cool. What happens if a customer has enable U2F and they lose their security key? Does that mean they’re going to be locked out of Aptible?

Thomas Orozco: Yeah. Typically we’ll recommend that you, whenever you enable U2F you will not be disabling regular token based 2FA. You will still be able to use your regular codes again, and you’ll also be able to use recovery codes to log in. Essentially [00:25:00] if you lose your FIDO key, it’s going to be the same thing as if you lost your phone. After enabling 2FA on it you’ll have to use your recovery code and if you lost your recovery codes, then we’ll have to authenticate you, typically via making sure one of your account order confirms to your request to disable [00:25:20] your accounts.

Frank Macreery: Awesome. I think the last question about U2F is whether the U2F key is [00:25:30] used when using the Aptible CLI for example, when running Aptible SSH?

Thomas Orozco: That’s good question. No they’re not right now. Currently if you want to login to use the Aptible CLI, the Aptible login, you will have to use security code to login. We have in fact experimented with exposing these security keys by the command line, but essentially right now there isn’t libraries who call to make that work just yet.

Something [00:26:00] that we eventually want to do, but in our testing it tends not to work too well, Yubico DOS providing library to talk to U2F devices, so that’s what we try to use. Unfortunately right now it’s not working as seamlessly as you’d want. Which is right now we do require that you use your regular code from your phone to login using 2FA.

Frank Macreery: Awesome. Thanks, Thomas. Going back a little bit, we did have [00:26:30] a question about Appcanary. For customers who might be interested in the Appcanary private beta, practically speaking, what example of vulnerability might Appcanary be identifying in their app image. Is there an actual workflow for how they might remediate that or resolve the vulnerability?

Thomas Orozco: Sure. Typically any vulnerability in a package that you [00:27:00] have installed in your image can be spotted this way. For example would be shellshock. If you had an app that was installing a vulnerable version of bash, Appcanary would be able to notify you that you’re running a version of bash that is vulnerable to shellshock, this might become a problem. There’s plenty of cases where you may be showing [00:27:22] gaps to recommend line tool of the script.

Shellshock could affect you even if you running a web app. In all of these cases, [00:27:30] they would notify you and tell you you have this bash package that’s running an old version, you should upgrade to at least this new version. Then it’s usually going to be a matter of rebuilding your image and making sure you install the latest security patches as part of your rebuild. Potentially, patching your dock file to install a specific version of bash that’s not vulnerable and so on.

Frank Macreery: Awesome. That’s it for now. [00:28:00] Yeah, thanks very much Thomas.

Thomas Orozco: Great. Moving to changes we made to the Aptible platform to enhancing security. The main area where we worked this quarter was to lock down access to AWS APIs. We’re proud to say we’re now using short-term per-operation credentials for practically all of our API calls. In fact, 85% [00:28:30] of them are using these credentials.

The short term credential by three hours that we can tie back to just one specific operation and ultimately to a given user. If you’re restarting an app, all the API calls we make as part of that restart will be able to say that they are needed by your restart. It makes it very easy for us to audit that all the API calls are being made are what we expect.

For the remaining API calls we’ve made sure to restrict the permission [00:29:00] so that they are as narrow as possible. To give you a few examples, the long-term credentials now are used for things like writing telemetry data or managing Docker images, narrowing these permissions so the credential only has access to Docker images for one customer. They’re also used to configure internal DNS records.

For comparison, the short-term credentials that we use, these are used for things like touching your volumes, potentially attaching [00:29:30] them somewhere, backing them up, potentially deleting them, too. Routing the traffic, setting up load balancers, configuring DNS records. These are much more sensitive operations and all these that I mentioned are only using short-term credentials. Which, again, are tied to one specific API [00:29:50].

We just covered the Q&A sections a few minutes [00:30:00] ago, so we’re probably just going to put another Q&A stop right now. We can probably just move on to the next section, which is database self-service.

Feature-wise, that’s where we put most of our effort this quarter. We’re getting very close to what a lot of customer have been asking for awhile, which is being able to scale the database on Aptible on a self-service basis. It’s not there just yet, but we’re getting very close.

There’s two things we have in [00:30:30] fact shipped as part of that effort. Which are supporting Aptible, reloading a database on Aptible. And resizing disk much much faster than before.

Db reloading let’s you take one of your databases that you have running on Aptible and just reload it in place. This is typically useful if you’re doing things like changing your configuration via Postgres that’s used SQL segments specifically the ALTER SYSTEM [00:31:00] SET statement in order to change your configuration.

Some of these settings, they can’t actually be changed at one time, so you do need to restart the database afterwards. Well, db:reload via the Aptible CLI can be used for this. If you upgrade your CLI, you can use Aptible db:reload to restart the Postgres database after making changes.

Likewise, if you have a database that looks like it’s misbehaving, maybe you have a ton of logs that are being held, or you’ve leaked [00:31:30] a lot of connections from your app, in that case you can use Aptible db:reload to stop that and just restart the database.

This is expected to be fast. Our goal for this operation is to complete with only 10 seconds of downtime. The goal really is to make that as fast as possible. That’s something that you can realistically, if you have an emergency, that’s something you can realistically use. If you have an urgent problem to solve, that’s something you can realistically use even if you [00:32:00] have traffic, or if you’re hitting that database. It will cause some downtime, but it will be very minimal.

The next change we made around databases is to make disk resizes, when you want to change the size of your volume, to make these disk resizes faster. A little background here. Until recently, when you had to resize a disk, what we had to do is snapshot [00:32:30] the volume, underlying EBS volume for the database, we had to snapshot this and then create a new one.

There’s two problems with this. The first one is it’s actually pretty slow. This can create downtime and potentially unpredictably long downtime. In some cases we’ve seen it take hours to resize a disk that way. That’s hours during which you have to be offline, which is obviously going to be a major issue in some cases. There’s a [00:33:00] performance impact, where after restoring these snapshots the volume is going to be slower.

The other change we made, is that we can now resize EBS volumes without recreating them. We can just resize them on the fly, that only takes a few seconds. That’s enabled by a change that AWS made that we’re now supporting at Aptible. This also has a side effect that it doesn’t impact the performance of the volume itself.

To give you a comparison, this is a chart of the changes we had to do [00:33:30] before to resize the volume. You can see that these are all the steps and there’s one that’s overwhelmingly long, that’s the one where we have to resize. This one is taking 11 minutes, which is quite long. And overall your database has to be down for 12 minutes. If you compare that to what happens afterwards, you can see that to resize it, it just takes a few seconds. It’s not even the longer part anymore.

Overall the total downtime that was potentially 12 minutes, even [00:34:00] longer in some cases, is now only 30 seconds. Which makes this operation much much less dangerous. There’s much less potential for downtime.

All of that means that we’ll soon be able to support database self-service resizes, so resizing your disk, you’ll be able to do that yourself. But also resizing the database containers, potentially scaling it up or down. These are features that we plan to ship next quarter. These are all enabled by the changes that we made this quarter.

One is about the new db:reload functionality. The question is whether, if a customer makes changes to their database’s configuration, will those changes persist if they db:reload?

Thomas Orozco: That’s a good question. It depends on the database. If the database, [00:34:56] like passwords persists those, to disk, like [00:35:00] when you use ALTER SYSTEM SET, then yes. Many of the databases will not let you do that. In that case you have to rerun deconfiguration.

Frank Macreery: Cool. On database resizing, there is a question about supporting automatically resizable database volumes. I can actually answer this one. This one right now is, we in particular use EFS as a specific [00:35:30] basis for this because of compliance reasons. That’s part of why we were pretty excited when elastic volumes came out because it provided a lower downtime way to resize volumes that still compatible with Amazon’s BAA, and their HIPAA eligible services. Right now EFS is not a HIPAA eligible service, but of course if they make it one, we will review that.

Thomas, did you have anything to add to that.

Thomas Orozco: No, not at all.

Frank Macreery: We’ve got another question in the [00:36:00] chat about what tool we use to create the db resize performance diagram. You want to do that, Thomas?

Thomas Orozco: Yeah, that’s internal tool we use to troubleshoot performance issues and operations [00:36:13] adaptable. That’s actually telemetry data, I was mentioning earlier. We use, when we review an operation we push that data to F3, essentially a data block that describes the operation, how long each of these steps took. Then we have a visualization of this one, which uses [00:36:32] [00:36:30] Gould’s graphing library. Therefore, it’s just a [00:36:35] gam shot, using that library. Which I think is called [00:36:41] gruel visualization toolkit, if I’m not mistaken.

Frank Macreery: Cool. Awesome, thanks Thomas.

Thomas Orozco: I’ll try to add this, since we’re probably running a little late on the Enclave part. I was talking about this last session, which is the usability improvements. That’s going to be a little more of a grab bag [00:37:00] of features. Which again, like all contribute to making your life a little easier.

The first one is that our SSH sessions will now terminate more quickly. By default it, if you were disconnected before, your SSH session might stick around for awhile. Now that’s no longer the case, these sessions will be terminated within 2 minutes. This ensures that if you get disconnected, then you know what state your session is in. If you don’t have access anymore, then that session is going to be terminated. You can’t have a [00:37:30] runaway SSH process that’s not terminated.

The next change we made is to make memory management no longer require cooperation from your apps. Memory management is a feature we introduced six months ago. The way it works is if your app exceeds its memory allocation, we can just restart it in place. This ensures that if you have a memory leak, the app doesn’t just use up all the memory on the host and then just dies. Instead we properly restart it [00:38:00] when there’s still some memory left. When that shipped, we restarted your containers in place. Which had the downside that if the container itself left, for example, a pitfall behind, then it might fail to restart. Which made it a little harder to use that feature, and in some cases you had to make changes to your app to work with it.

What we did here was we no longer required that. Instead, we always recreate a pristine [00:38:30] container, essentially a new container from scratch. This ensures, it does the same thing as if the container had just started, it ensures that your app is compatible, you don’t have to do anything. We’ve also started enabling memory management more proactively, since that is now something we can do, since that change.

Finally, the last Enclave change is we now have first-class support for Sumo Logic and Logentries. These are login providers that [00:39:00] assign BAAs. If you have logs that contain PHI, they can be a good alternative to running your ELK stack on Aptible. For both of these, you’ll be able to use them now, just by copy/pasting a few values, whereas before you might have had to run a custom lock stash on Aptible. Which was not as convenient.

That’s it.

Frank Macreery: [00:39:30] Awesome. Thanks very much, Thomas.

There are no more questions for this section, but we had a bunch for the previous one. I think we’re in good shape on time, so thanks again for all of those useful updates.

With that, I think we can hand it over to Skylar, who’s the lead on our Gridiron product and he’s going to tell us a little bit about our Gridiron updates this quarter.

Skylar Anderson: [00:40:00] Thank, Frank. One second. Okay.

As Frank said, I’m Skylar Anderson, I’m a Lead Frontend Engineer here at Aptible. I work primarily on the Gridiron product. Today I’m going to give you a quick update on what’s new this quarter. But to start, I wanted to do a quick refresher on what Gridiron is, because it’s a new product that we basically rolled out this quarter.

It consists of a suite [00:40:30] of tools to help modern software engineering teams build and maintain their security program. What that means is we make the administrative side of protecting data easy. Our customer might consider the administrator’s side of complying with HIPAA easy, or any other standard.

It also means that we help you prep for audits. Not just regulatory audits, but also audits and security assessments that your customers [00:41:00] may be interested in. That really can help you sell faster because we store all of your compliance data in one place, and then make it really easy to generate reporting and data off that that you can easily hand off to a customer or an auditor.

We also like to think of Gridiron, kind of like as Quickbooks is to accounting, Gridiron is to security management. We take this really complex and messy thing, but frame it in a simple, [00:41:30] predictable way to get the outcome that you’re looking for.

Somewhat generally how Gridiron works, at the core of it is what we call the Gridiron data model, it’s what you see here in the center. That is a combination of everything we know about you. Our expertise, industry standards. It’s seeded by what we call your profile data. It’s how you’re deployed, your workforce, your physical location, security [00:42:00] the Sass tools you use. That is filtered through our data model.

Then it’s used to generate all these different deliverables that you can use to prove your compliance, to send to an auditor. But also for your own business operations. Some example deliverables are risk assessments, which is a catalog of all the vulnerabilities and attacks that are specifically relevant to you. But also the controls available, security controls available to help you mitigate those.

[00:42:30] Policies and procedures, these are highly customized to your profile and how your business operates. We help you generate a security control baseline, so you know when you come into Gridiron where you stand, so you have a place to look back to as you improve over time.

Your profile data is also used to drive your security and privacy training, which is going to be customized to your own unique data model and then distributed to your workforce. And we have tools to help manage that.

Finally, is reporting. [00:43:00] This is your place to see how your security program stacks up to actual standards. So start the HIPAA security role, for example, I’ll show you that in a bit, and much more. There’s many other tools within Gridiron that are informed by your data model. Tools like security reviews and incident response.

If we zoom in a bit on the Gridiron data model, I mentioned this briefly, but it consists of three layers that combine to form this unique Gridiron model on [00:43:30] top. At the core of it is industry standards. Things like misguidance, but also vulnerability and attack databases. Layered on top of that is our Gridiron shared intelligence data. That’s essentially our expertise. That’s us filtering the standards, but also augmenting. It’s more focused to modern engineering teams, the pulling on the cloud, and it’s consistent with what we’ve seen from our customers on [00:44:00] Enclave.

The third phase is your unique profile data. This is essentially your infrastructure, how you’re deployed, what Sass services do you use, how your company runs your workforce, physical location, security. Those all combined to form your unique data model. That’s what’s used to inform all these phases, are all these deliverables from Gridiron.

That was the abstract behind the scenes of how Gridiron works, but what I want to cover now [00:44:30] is what an actual Gridiron implementation looks like if you’re a customer. I want to emphasize this first point here that using Gridiron is a very hands-on process. It’s guided by us at Aptible, and we provide hands-on support and training.

That’s even starting with a two hour onboarding call with Aptible directly, where we’ll essentially walk you through the basics of maintaining a security program [00:45:00] and how that might apply to whichever protocol is relevant for you. Right now that protocol is HIPAA, but that protocol library is going to expand. On that call we also help you set up a baseline set of controls. That’s our assessment of where your security program is today, so you’re able to track how you grow over time.

Finally, we’ll walk you through all the reporting and documentation available to us in Gridiron and how to use tools, what they mean, and how you can derive [00:45:30] values out of those tools.

Some screenshots, this is the Aptible guide that’s set up. We often call this security program design. Somebody from Aptible will walk you through this wizard, collecting all the information we need to build a baseline security program for you. This is where we’re learning about what you do today. Then we have other tools that help you plan for the future that I’ll show later.

Included in this is a baseline security control assessment. This is [00:46:00] where we learn about what you’re doing today, what’s included in your security program. You can see there’s dozens of controls and we have some sorting on categories to make it easy to find.

If we zoom in on one of them, like source code management, I want to highlight that Gridiron is really easy to use, because we’ve used our experience from Enclave, and we know how to ask really simple and direct questions that are truly relevant to modern software engineers. [00:46:30] Here’s an example one, source code management. It’s very simple, if you’ve seen any other questionnaires, maybe from a customer or some of these open source questionnaires online, they’re very difficult to understand. They’re often in excel spreadsheets with difficult to understand languages, too abstract. Our controls are always very direct and simple to understand.

The next phase is the documenting and reporting. In this view, this is an example risk assessment, where I’m looking [00:47:00] at the risks that are most relevant to me. I’ve got it sorted by the risk level. This is a really useful tool. Right now at a glimpse I can see the most relevant risks sorted by what we call the risk level, which is a composite of all the attributes we know about this particular risk, such as its impact or likelihood. We compile that into a risk level that makes it easy at a glance to see the most important risk.

But then if you were to click into any one of [00:47:30] these, you can see the security controls that we have available that are proven to mitigate that particular risk. You can view your status against each of those controls to make decisions about what sort of controls you might want to spend engineering effort on to help mitigate your most dangerous risks.

We also use your profile data to build a unique set of policies and procedures. Here’s an example. This policy is generated using [00:48:00] your own custom profile data, so they’re not static, it’s highly tuned to how you’ve configured your baseline set of security controls and the policies that you have in place. We build all of the pros of the policies based on your configuration.

Similar to that, we do the same with training. Training is highly customized to your security program. We have this dashboard here to help manage the status of your training. You don’t directly manage the content of the training. It changes [00:48:30] over time as you adapt your security program. But on this screen you can see I can assign and track the status of different training courses to users.

New this quarter, we have a new reporting feature within Gridiron. This particular one is the HIPAA security rule report which is a mapping of all the controls we have in place on Gridiron to actual subsections within the HIPAA security rule, to make is really easy at a glace to see how you [00:49:00] measure up against the security rule.

This is just the start. We’re starting to build a library of mappings between our controls and actual standards, in this case it’s the HIPAA security rule. Next we’ll probably be the privacy rule. But this will allow you to create a view into your security program, what you’re doing as it relates to these different standards. And then help you improve over time. So for any one of these controls, I can configure [00:49:30], oh we actually are doing independent audits now so I can turn that green.

How is this better? Because we’re so focused on modern software engineering teams and our experience from Enclave has informed every step of the product development of Gridiron. That means it’s really fast because we ask only the most important questions directly. In fact, onboarding can be completed in less than 10 hours.

It’s also extremely easy. [00:50:00] Because we are so direct and we speak your language, and we’re familiar with the Sass tools and infrastructure tools that our customers are using, there’s no obscure questionnaires and we ask only the most relevant questions of you.

Particularly new things this quarter, I mentioned Gridiron basically opened up the public availability this quarter, but there are some new tools included within it. The first is infrastructure and Sass services configuration. Previously Gridiron [00:50:30] required that you were deployed on Enclave. That was because we knew about all the infrastructure settings on Enclave, but now we’ve opened it up and can support different deployment platforms and I’ll talk more in detail about what that means in a sec.

Also added was the HIPAA security rule report, which I just previewed. A new security reviews tool, which is a tool that sets the cadence for your periodic security reviews based off your infrastructure and based off your Sass services that you use, [00:51:00] and the confidentiality of those determines the cadence of each tool, or of each service.

Finally, we’re re-releasing our incident response tool with some new features, in particular you can do now incident response training straight within the dashboard.

Gridiron pricing as I mentioned we’re coming out with additional protocols, but with the first protocol, with the Gridiron baseline is $24.00 a month, and you pay that annually. [00:51:30] You can purchase additional protocols, so [00:51:33] TCI/DCI are in stock, too, and they’re available, are $499 per month. Additional training seats is $49 per certification per year.

What I’m excited to announce is the AWS private beta program. As I mentioned previously Gridiron was for Enclave only customers. We have been able to open that up and we’re specifically targeting customer deployed on AWS and we’re offering early access [00:52:00] plus a 50% permanent discount for those customer. So, if you’re deployed on AWS and you’re interested in using Gridiron to manage your security program, this is exactly what you need.

If you’re interested in a demo or you want to learn more about this program, you should email shah@aptible.com, he’s our sales lead and he can arrange that demo for you.

Frank Macreery: Awesome, [00:52:30] thanks very much Skylar.

We did get one question here. The question is from a customer who I guess is working with an auditor. Is it possible to give an auditor access to Gridiron so to and Aptible Gridiron account, so that the auditor can look at and review a customer’s risk assessments and policies?

Skylar Anderson: Yeah, you can grant anybody permission to your Gridiron [00:53:00] account. As long as they have the right role permissions, they can have full access to your security program and generate that documentation themselves.

We are working on rolling out actual PDF generation for all of our reports and documentation, to make these view a little more distributable, so you don’t have to go through that step. But you absolutely can and that’s something that we’re going to fine tune over time and we’ve considered actual audit type permissions that’s … UX is more focused on an auditor’s view into your compliance program and less [00:53:30] into your team and your internal view. That’s something we’ve thought about, too. But today right now, you can add anybody. Yes.

Frank Macreery: Another question is, can Gridiron be used for other types of compliance? Other frameworks like PCI/DSS or SOC? And what’s the timeframe for being able to use it for those frameworks?

Skylar Anderson: [00:54:00] You can use them for those frameworks today. There’s a huge benefit to using a tool like Gridiron to manage your security program and all the ancillary tools that come with it. What you’re getting with the additional protocols is the mapping and the specific reporting to those protocols, so generating a proof of compliance with PCI/DSS. That would be where you purchase the additional protocol, to see those views of the mappings of what [00:54:30] you’ve done to the actual requirements of those standards.

As far as when those come out, I don’t know exactly when this year we’ll roll those out. Probably the next quarter. But when that’s available we’ll be sure to make an announcement.

Frank Macreery: Awesome. In terms of standard HIPAA security assessment or a vendor security assessment for an enterprise healthcare company, documents [00:55:00] that you can generate in Gridiron. How much of that standard security assessment do they cover?

Skylar Anderson: I don’t know if it’ll answer all the questions. It’ll certainly answer a lot of them, and it’ll be a really solid baseline against a standard assessment. There’s always app level of controls and things beyond what we may have accounted for. That being said, we’re always [00:55:30] growing our library of component and questionnaires. And app level components is something that’s going to be huge in the next quarter, it’s one of our biggest focuses, but this is a growing library and we’re open to feedback. If you do hit a questionnaire that you’re not sure of, we would be highly interested in seeing that. Again, I want to emphasize it’s a hands on process, so there’s always an open dialog where if there’s an assessment you’re having issues [00:56:00] with, we can help you.

Frank Macreery: Got it. There’s a couple of remaining questions. Can you recap pricing for Gridiron, both for Gridiron standalone and Gridiron for existing customers? Either Skylar or Chas?

Chas Ballew: Yeah, I can answer that. So the question is what is current pricing? Current pricing is roughly $30,000 a year for standalone customers. We’re doing the AWS private beta, so if you’re [00:56:30] deployed directly on AWS, you’re not a current Gridiron customer and you want to lock in low pricing, we will do a 12K for the year, or a thousand a month.

Then as you add more protocols or as you add more seats for training certifications, you would pay as you scale. But you’d basically lock that price in lower.

I see there’s a question here about micro-tier, or startup stage? Our current focus right now is getting Gridiron 100% feature complete [00:57:00] and usable for, we were talking about earlier, for adding an auditor and have everything an auditor, like a SOC 2 auditor or an ISO auditor or a HIPAA auditor would need, right in Gridiron organized and ready and getting those prep and readiness phases for those audits down to almost nothing.

That’s our current focus. When we have that feature complete and we have customers using it for audits, we probably will introduce [00:57:30] sort of an introductory level set of Gridiron features. We haven’t really committed to that just yet and what that’ll look like, but that will be an important thing to make sure that we can get customers using Gridiron before they’re ready to go full bore with assessments. So yeah, absolutely.

Frank Macreery: Awesome. I think that’s it for questions. I guess, [00:58:00] Chas, take us into the weekend or into our Wednesday.

Chas Ballew: The recording for this, all of our video, we’ll post a transcript and slides. We’ll link that from aptible.com/resources. We’ll put the video on YouTube, put the slides on SlideShare or whatever a preferred slide sharing tool is. That’ll be up, we’ll send a tweet about it and then everybody will receive an email, all of the attendees for this, and registrants [00:58:30] for this, will receive an email that’ll have a link to these materials. And in addition a link to the next webinar so you can register for that, but it on your calendar.

That’ll be Tuesday, July 25th, at the same time, 11 am pacific, 2 pm eastern. In addition if you have any follow up questions, feel free to contact us. support@aptible.com is a good way to get in touch with our entire team, so just let us know.

[00:59:00] If that’s it, thank you everyone for attending. I hope this was helpful, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Aptible SOC 2 Type 2 Report Now Available

Aptible has achieved SOC 2 Type 2 compliance for the security and availability Trust Service Principles. This post shares a bit more about what this means and why this type of compliance is so valuable to B2B SaaS companies in specific. We’ll also share how you can start building a security program that meets SOC 2 requirements and is audit-ready.